The 1st Marine Division landed on Peleliu's beaches under intense Japanese fire, beginning an assault that commanders had predicted would take four days but that instead dragged on for over two months. Japanese defenders under Colonel Kunio Nakagawa abandoned the doomed beach defense doctrine of earlier island battles for a new strategy of deep caves and tunnels, inflicting devastating American casualties and making Peleliu one of the war's bloodiest, most controversial fights.
Admiral William Halsey had actually argued the invasion was unnecessary, believing Peleliu could simply be bypassed as American forces pushed toward the Philippines. His objections were overruled, and the Marines landed anyway on the assumption that Japanese airfields there threatened MacArthur's flank.
The defenders, dug into the island's coral ridges known as the Umurbrogol, had learned from earlier defeats. Rather than dying gloriously in beach charges, Colonel Nakagawa's 10,000 troops hid in a labyrinth of caves and bunkers connected by tunnels, some with steel doors, forcing Marines into brutal cave-by-cave combat in tropical heat that exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Many Marines died of heat exhaustion as much as enemy fire; canteens ran dry and men drank from oil-contaminated drums shipped ashore by mistake.
Eugene Sledge, a young mortarman whose memoir 'With the Old Breed' later became one of the most searing firsthand accounts of Pacific combat, described the coral ridges as an eroded moonscape littered with corpses that could not even be buried in the rocky ground. The 1st Marine Division suffered over 1,700 dead and 8,000 wounded taking an island whose strategic value remains debated by historians to this day.
Key people: Kunio Nakagawa, William Halsey, Eugene Sledge